IndustrialSage

All right, well welcome back, let’s go ahead and jump into this episode. Before we do that, like always, we’ve got Daniel Loeschen here, if you can just introduce yourself to the audience and who you guys are, MXD Process, what are you guys up to?

So my name is Daniel Loeschen, I’m the Marketing Director for MXD Process, we’re based in Louisville, Kentucky. And we are a process manufacturer, process equipment manufacturer, and we take a three pronged approach to how we do it. So we manufacture everything in house, in Louisville, and we have a mixing equipment side of our business, so we build industrial agitators, mixing equipment, and then a stainless steel tank shop where we build stainless steel tanks from five gallon to 25,000 gallon, and then a process controls, like batch control systems. And we tie it all together though our process engineering and programming and all that right in our plant.

Great, awesome. So, a couple questions I actually want to ask just to clarify on that, as far as your go-to market strategies, do you guys deal primarily with distributors? Are you dealing direct? Obviously I would think direct where you apply something.

Yeah, mainly direct. We’re not exclusively direct. The company started kind of that way, because we wanted to do something a little different in the industry where it was a hundred percent distributors, suppliers, sales reps, and so we started wanting to go direct to kind of cut that out, take the Warby Parker approach except in an industrial scale.

Sure, yeah.

But over time, we don’t want to ignore that that’s how business is done. And so we do have some sales reps, but we don’t make any exclusive deals to do that.

Gotcha. Okay, so, a little backstory for our audience who’s watching us. So we found MXD Process and we found Daniel through Twitter, actually, was interesting. So noticed that you guys had a really interesting profile, it was very well done. It was very accurate, there were a lot of things going on. And so we thought we’d reach out and just kind of see, what you guys are doing, if there’s value there and just to get an understanding of your story. And so, I’d love to just go through your story, I mean how you guys kind of transitioned, ’cause it’s kind of interesting, where you guys started from when you weren’t doing digital marketing, what was that aha moment and to where you are now? So, what did it look like? I think what you said is, the company’s about eight years old or so. Give us the snapshot of what it looked like back then?

Yeah, so, really, it started with our CEO. He was a chemical engineer by trade, and he was a vice president of another mixing company that just did mixers. And he worked there, I don’t know how long he worked there, but that’s where he started to learn all the ways that the industry is lacking in marketing specifically and ways that things could be done better, like going direct to the customer. ‘Cause one of the things that he believed was that the customer is smart enough to be able to know what they want. Which I don’t think… a lot of companies, at least, don’t encourage that. And so when he parted ways with the previous company he started, Mixer Direct was the name of the company at the time. And we just did mixing equipment, just mixers, not tanks and all that stuff. And so he wanted to take a different approach. An online first approach, which was something that had never been done in the industry. Really a customer online first approach to marketing and sales.

So what did that look like? What was the landscape? You were taking it online, what–

Yeah, invest heavily in a website, which most, I would say 50% of the competitors at the time, didn’t even have a website.

Wow.

And you’re talking 2010, so I mean, that’s crazy behind, but that’s the way, that’s the landscape of the industry. And so, invested heavily in a website and an e-commerce, which was a first in the industry to be able to actually sell that stuff online. For a customer to get online and buy an industrial mixer without ever talking to the sales person was completely new.

And having a printed catalog or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And so, because the industry was old, you didn’t want to just ignore that. And so he did, we made a catalog and they sent it out, like the first time they blasted it out just to let people know, “Hey, we exist.” But then after that, never did it again. And that started driving people to the website, and then invested in SEO. I started, at first, there was a company that he was paying to consult and do that, same with ad-words, started doing ad-words. And then a couple years into it, we started seeing competitors kind of jump on board, trying to do the same thing, seeing that there’s probably value there. And that’s when I came on. So I got hired really to start the marketing department at now MXD Process, we’ve changed our name since. And so when I came on, that was where we were at. Everything was outsourced. We had an SEO company that we were working with, an ad-words company that we were working with, no social media. And we had a blog with two posts or something. Because someone probably told them that you needed to do that. And so when I came on, I started just evaluating, trying to figure out the industry, ’cause I didn’t come from manufacturing. Trying to figure out what it is that we need to do. What is working, what’s not working, just throwing everything at the wall, seeing what sticks, that kind of thing. And that’s when we started investing in social media, we brought SEO in-house. We brought ad-words in-house as well. Because of how niche our industry is, it was really hard to find partners that understood what we were doing and where the value was. And I imagine a lot of other industrial companies experienced that same thing, but most of the PPC companies are SEO companies come from e-commerce backgrounds, they were wanting to sell shoes and stuff like that.

What do you search for?

Right.

For industrial, I’m looking for big take.

Right, yeah, they just have no idea, which is understandable, but, we knew better than they did it, at what we were trying to do and where the value was. So, we brought all that stuff in-house and started optimizing it and trying to figure out where the value was. And, we were just from the out of the gate, just dominating our competitors in online search specifically. That was the first domino to fall was, we just–

Online search.

Online search. We owned that and we did that by content, a lot of content and we still pump out a lot of content.

So what different types of form? Like what forms of content?

Yeah, I mean back when, four or five years ago when infographics were a big deal, we jumped on that train and invested a lot to get really well done infographics that weren’t just cool pictures, but actually informative. And that drove a lot of leads to our website and started showing up in search results back when Google did rich snippets. I don’t know if you remember that?

Oh yeah.

So that’s when we invested in video, we started, we bought equipment and started shooting a lot of videos, customer videos, and internal videos, just showing process builds and things like that. And that was really valuable then, because Google would rank those search results in there.

You actually get search results from that.

Yeah. And then they killed that, they don’t do that anymore.

It was funny, it was actually a short blip almost. It was like a year or so. And then everyone had, and then it, they said–

They were talking about it at conferences and everything, and it was a huge thing. And then all of a sudden they just killed it. And so video was still really valuable, but we just had to shift direction. So we use video now more as like a lead nurturing thing, not necessarily like a lead capturing, tool.

Sure, yeah.

So yeah, search traffic was the first one to really go. And then we hired someone to start building our social media and I mean, I think now I haven’t counted in a couple months, but I think we have a following total of around 150000, which is by far more than,

Across all on different social media platforms.

Across all the social media channels, yeah. Which is by far more than any of our competitors.

I would think so, yeah.

Yeah. And I think the reason there is just because people don’t see that it is valuable. I remember a couple of years after we were doing it, we did a trade show in Germany. And I had someone from Russia that came up to our booth and was like, “I follow you guys on Instagram”. And he came and talked to us in our booth.

Interesting.

And they were manufacturing something in Russia, so that global reach that you can get through, especially with social media, minimal investment. And we still to this day have not done paid advertising on social. It’s something we’ve looked into, and I know that there probably is value there. We just haven’t, it hasn’t been a priority for us with the way it’s going. ‘Cause it’s going well. And we’re investing heavily in search advertising. So I think that we will at some point, but that’s not where we’re at right now.

That’s really interesting. So what would you say, let’s walk us through this ’cause a social media thing is, it’s definitely a question that comes up all the time. Should we be investing in social media? Should we be doing this or not? And I think certain times, yes, certain types, no, it just depends on who your target, where they are and all that. But what are some examples of content that you would put up on like Twitter?

Yeah, well I think the one thing before even talking about examples of content and the one thing to remember with social media is that I think that we all forget because we’re all B2B companies. And so we think in terms of selling to a business, like I’m trying to sell to a business, which is true. But the people that are buying are actual people that are on social media and they’re on Facebook, they’re on Instagram, they’re at home at night laying in bed, scrolling through their Instagram, just like you and me. And, so that was kind of the basic… we want to sell to these engineers, and how do we sell to them? What platforms are they on? How can we get in their mind, that kind of thing through. So we did that through like remarketing and stuff like that. And we would find accounts on Instagram and Twitter that a bunch of engineers would follow and then we would follow them and then produce content that they would be interested in. Like, how beer is made, for example. We sell a lot into the brewing and distilling, except we would, instead of just how beer is made with yeast and all this stuff, ’cause they already know that, we would focus more on the equipment. So what equipment is used with yeast propagation, things like that, so that they could see that and make the connection between what we do, what they do, what they need, and then try and get shares and likes and visits to our website from there. So it was all about finding the people where they’re at, treating them like people and then giving them equipment or content that made sense for what they did.

I love what you said: at the end of the day, yeah, okay, maybe in B2B you’re selling to another business, but you are assigned to people and so you’re right. Totally forgot about that.

Yeah, I almost feel like the B2B shouldn’t exist, ’cause it’s like we are selling business to business, but it’s really B2C, you’re still selling to a customer, they’re just a different type of consumer

I love it, that’s awesome. Just out of curiosity, what is your, in your mind, your best performing social media platform or which channel?

It’s definitely Twitter, definitely Twitter. We get far more visits and phone calls from Twitter than we do any other channel. Facebook at first was great and it’s just kind of gone on the decline since they made all the algorithm changes. It’s totally paid to play now on Facebook, which is why we’re thinking about launching some paid campaigns through there. Instagram has been really interesting for branding and community building, not as much direct value as Twitter. But man, when we go places, the people that always come up to us that want to meet us and follow us are always people from Instagram, which is really fascinating. I didn’t expect that , we built a community of welders, which really helps for finding welders for hire. All right ’cause I mean if we don’t have welders we’re out of business. And so we made a #titanwelds for our Titan Tanks brand and started doing… I think it was called Titan Tuesdays or something where people would submit their arcs and we would regram their stuff. And we built a huge following just from, initially from doing that. And so finding the people that are interested in that has really helped for branding on there. And it’s a tangible way to track it instead of just like, “Well, I think it’s going well.”

Yeah, right, exactly.

‘Cause we’re not interested in hoping things are working.

It’s a great segue into, all right, that’s awesome. You must be measuring it somehow. What does that look like?

Yeah, so the way that we measure that is through our marketing platform, we use HubSpot. But there’s a million other–

Never heard of it, but…

Yeah, yeah. I’m sure that they all track fairly the same, but we track it through there. So it always starts with visits. We track engagement from the actual platform itself. And one thing that we noticed, and I don’t know if all the platforms are the same, but we noticed that numbers tend to be different, from HubSpot, for example, we’ll say that you had 50 shares of this one thing, but Twitter will say you had 70, so the numbers are always off. So we always try to go for those numbers specifically to the source. So like for Twitter.

Hold on, you’re saying you’re pulling it out of Twitter versus–

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. ‘Cause they have Twitter analytics for business and all that stuff. So we get the engagement numbers from the actual platform itself, the social media platform, but visits are always the same. And so then we track visits through our marketing platform, or you can do it through Google analytics. So you don’t have to buy a marketing platform to track this stuff. And you can track it all the way through the funnel of what pages they visited, how long they were on your site. And we can see what platforms are engaging more, once they get to our site, are they bouncing or are they sticking around and viewing a bunch of pages, that kind of thing. And so we track it all the way through like that to whether they fill out a contact form, and we count that as a conversion. ‘Cause then that goes directly to the sales person. And then from there, to a quote, it has its own conversion rate that we measure. But, contact form is a conversion and then a phone call. And so we have a, we use a program call tracking metrics to dynamically generate phone numbers on our website. So we have our main phone number on there all the time. But if someone visits our site from Twitter, then they’ll see a specific phone number. And then if they call that number then we know that they came and then when they call it, we can track that, the sales team then puts the deal source or the lead source in the CRM, so that we can attach where they came from with their record and then follow that all the way through.

And at that point you can generate reports every month or whatever.

Yeah reports, so we can say we spent X amount of dollars on Twitter investment and we got this much in return, and there’s no lost, there’s nothing lost anywhere, especially if we just switched our website over to an HTTPS website, which we were losing traffic source

Because it wasn’t secure?

Because it wasn’t secure, yeah. So we had a lot of, not provider direct traffic that we didn’t know where it was coming from. And we, immediately, as soon as we launched that, it just disappeared.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah.

So interesting, I’m just curious from a CRM standpoint, you’d be able to track that, what are you guys using?

So HubSpot CRM.

HubSpot CRM, okay.

Yeah, the way that it integrates seamlessly and it’s been really great.

That’s awesome. So you’re able to generate those reports and be able to go back and have that information and that’s absolutely fantastic. A lot of great information in here. To the firms, to those organizations, those companies out there saying, “Hey, maybe we need to be looking into social media,” or they’re thinking about it. What would, let’s say, what would your advice be to them saying, “Hey, look at this, look at that.” Like what would you recommend?

Yeah, I would say, start with seeing what your competitors are doing, because that is a really great way to see what is working and what’s not. If all of your competitors are doing it and it seems like things are working, well, there’s a great jumping off point. But then do the research and see what they’re not doing well, so if they’re doing a great job, they’ve got a lot of followers, people are engaging, that’s awesome. Start doing that but then see what the pain points are. You can reach out to their customers, I mean, that’s easy to do. You don’t even have to have their phone numbers and stuff. You know what I mean? You can find them, see what they like, what they don’t like, what kind of content are they producing, that’s not being shared? There’s a really great tool, specifically for Twitter, it’s called Followerwonk. You can plug in any Twitter account and then it, for free, it’ll analyze it for you. And, they get really granular details of those people from demographics to when people are sharing the most online, what percentage of followers share the most, things like that. And you can make very, very good informed decisions based off that data. So yeah, I would say number one, do the competitor research and see what’s working and what’s not. I mean, maybe you were lucky like we were in your industry where you went to do the competitor research and no one was doing anything.

There’s nobody there.

And if that’s the case, then it’s wide open for you. But yeah, that’s where I would start. And then, there’s tons of great resources out there. Like the Moz Blog. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that?

Oh yeah.

They have a lot of great resources and even have an ebook if you’re starting out. I mean, this is basic, but if you’re starting out, they have an ebook that’s like the basics of social media marketing. It kind of walks you through that. And they talk a lot about the people to people connection in there. And, some stuff has changed. I think now people kind of have some blindness to a lot of businesses on social media because it’s just inundated. So you have to figure out how your stuff is going to stand out and not seem so robotic and corporate, ’cause people just don’t want to see that. Even the people that worked for corporate companies, they don’t want to see that. So, but I think it all starts with knowing where your competitors are, knowing where your, where the people in your industry are that you want to sell to, and then try and find that sweet spot of content that people care about. I mean, if you’re not going to invest in putting content out there that people will care about, then don’t do it. You’re just wasting your time.

Wasting time.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Another question I was actually just thinking up here, as far as the time investment in terms of not the time to do each tactical thing, but just saying, look at the time that it takes building the profile, putting content, building an audience, and all that stuff. What expectations are on that?

Yeah, I mean, I think to get started, like it’s not a huge time commitment. I mean, I think that doing a solid normal work schedule for a month, you can probably get a really good ground just like groundwork, of knowing where you should start. So doing your competitor research and all that, and you don’t have to hire someone to do that. I mean, if you’re, I don’t know, it depends on the size of your company, but you can task someone with doing that. Say, take two hours a day of your workday and just report on this stuff, do the research and we’ll make some decisions after that, but to do it well after that, I mean we hired a full time person, and I think that to do it well, and to get it to the point where you’re seeing value from it, you got to have someone dedicated. A lot of companies, and you’ve probably seen this too that want to get started on social media. The CEO is posting something every once a day or whatever, and not really responding. And they’re just like, “Well, as long as we’re on Twitter, it’s fine.” But if you want to treat it as a legit marketing channel that’s going to drive leads, I mean, I think the time commitment is a full time job, and there’s plenty of talented people out there.

You’re saying you have to engage.

You have to engage, yeah. You have to engage. If you’re not, don’t do it. And that’s fine too. I mean, if your company’s at a point where that’s not practical for you, that’s fine, but don’t pretend to do it, if you’re going to do it, do it, or don’t. I don’t think there’s, especially now, there’s just not room for the in-between. Twitter is where I would start, because it’s not quite to the pay to play yet, like Facebook is. And also you get the added search benefit of it because now Tweets are being indexed in Google search.

I did not know that, okay.

Yeah. Yeah, if it, right now, you really see it with high profile accounts. Like if you Google a celebrity, their tweets are along the top or whatever, that kind of thing.

Oh that makes sense.

But it’s filtering down more and more into companies. If you Google search Nike or something, the big companies, verified accounts, I think that’s where they started. So, but it’s filtering down.

Awesome.

Yeah.

That’s been really interesting. There’s a lot of information here. I’ve certainly learned a lot. If any of our audience members, have any questions, is there anywhere where they could reach you?

Sure, I mean, you can just email me directly it’s daniel.loeschen, which is my last name, I don’t know if you want me to spell that.

We can put it on the, well actually if someone’s listening, maybe spell it.

Yeah, so Daniel dot L-O-E-S-C-H-E-N @mxdprocess.com. You can email me there.

Excellent, that would be awesome. And of course, I’m going to check out all your social media channels and things you guys got going on there. Thanks so much for joining us today and sharing just a wealth of information. It was- like I said, I’ve learned a lot. So thanks.

Well thanks for having me.

It was awesome. So there you have it. Social media. It’s the myth of, do we really need it? Do we not? And to be a hundred percent honest with you, I learned a lot, I’ve definitely after this conversation, rethinking that whole social media thing. And at the end of the day, I think one of the key takeaways for me was that really at the end of the day, you’re selling to people. Even though it’s B2B, you’re selling to people. That was super insightful.

So, listen, thanks again so much for watching this episode. Take, use this, take some takeaways. They’re going to jump into social media, take into some of these recommendations and what Daniel was telling us here. And, feel free to be kind to us on our social media, share us, like, tweet, all that good stuff. We’d love to hear. If you have any questions, reach out to us at IndustrialSage.com/questions. We’d love to answer them for you. Thanks for watching. I’m Danny Gonzales, and this is IndustrialSage.

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All right. So let’s jump into today’s executive series. I have Kai Beckhaus who is the president at MCJ Supply Solutions. Thank you so much Kai, for joining me today on the IndustrialSage executive series.

Thanks for having me, Danny.

Excellent. So, for those who aren’t familiar and we were just kind of chatting a little bit, before we started here. Tell me a little bit about MCJ Supply Chain Solutions. You’ve got a little bit of a joint venture going on there, so yeah. Who are you guys? What do you guys do?

We’re bringing Jungheinrich supply chain solutions to the North American market. Jungheinrich is one of the world’s leading intralogistics companies based out of Hamburg in Germany and is cooperating for more than 10 years with Mitsubishi Caterpillar Forklift America, to bring forklift truck solutions and that’s mainly electric trucks to the North American market. And almost two years ago now, Mitsubishi, Caterpillar, and Jungheinrich have decided to build up a joint venture to bring automation and further supply chain solutions, which also include a specialized rental fleet here to the market. And that’s why MCJ is bringing AGVs, our robots here, to our customers in the US, Canada and Mexico.

All right. Excellent. So, we’re going to dive into this, a little bit more as we get it, but right now I kind of want to learn a little bit more about you, Kai. I want to learn about your, your background, your career, how you got into this. How, tell me, you know, take me way back. How did you get into this space?

Yeah, perfect. I actually have a software background there. So as a teenager that was a hobby and that’s my backbone. And then I attended the university, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and also a year at Imperial college in London with a focus on economics, computer science and law that was a combination course there. And after that, I added a PhD in Munich, as I wanted us to really see, to combine the practical aspects of the world with the theoretical university things that I learned there, and at the Technical University in Munich there, it was a good time, doing the PhD. My start after internships was Nokia Networks and the Boston consulting group really, in the worlds of real work whilst as a freelancer for a marketing agency in London.

Oh, really?

Right. I think it’s a really interesting sector, still. And I look back, it was exciting at that time, writing white papers for big IT companies there on success stories, customer reference stories. That was a good time I had. And then I started with Jungheinrich almost a dozen years ago now, and started off selling warehouse management systems and that was IT systems where the customers really manage all of their warehouse operations electronically. And my role was to gather the requirements, write specifications, talk through with the customers, what functions there are and what their needs are, where it was good learning, really listening to the customer and listening to exactly what the customer needs. That was a good start off there.

Then the need emerged from the market, that the Jungheinrich engineers were developing really cool features assistance systems, which are, for example, semi-automation. A track with an operator on board, would drive to the destination, with just giving speed and no searching there, but the target needs to be set from the IT system. And there was this gap, the customers’ IT system being any ERP system, product planning system, warehouse management system. We’re not able to send the data in the format that the truck would ask for the data. So there was this gap to bridge and so that fitted perfectly with my work previously in the PhD. So I was tasked to really install and then head a group to do this middle of integration. We call that logistics interface as it’s really an interface to link different logistics solutions together. And that was a great time creating a software and deploying it in these applications and adding more and more applications form these VNA trucks with semi-automation, to AGVs, to dynamic racking solutions. And there’s a lot of different applications that can be connected in that now.

And the next step there in the career, I was looking forward to going back international. But mine boss assigned to work from Singapore for some time there for Jungheinrich to roll out those intralogistics solutions in the Asia of Pacific region, which was a great time traveling through Asia Pacific based out of Singapore and helping our customers to make use of those technologies that were until then predominantly in Europe, with our customers. So that was a good point there in Singapore. Coming back, I quickly moved over to more management roles, portfolio product management, which is designing the future of the products and also the market intelligence department for the logistic systems which I headed before coming back to the automation sector, really, and being promoted to head the AGV implementation worldwide in the three different time zones. And there, we really saw Europe and the Middle East and Africa. In here it’s one region and really the different time zones, other world regions for your Jungheinrich there. So Asia Pacific, where I learned how they are operating, earlier on and then bringing automation to the North American markets with the focus on North America, but also Americas. So the Latin America region as well. And that was when we started really to prepare, “How is the best setup to bring those AGV solutions to our customers in North America?” And we prepared the foundation of a joint venture and that’s how we ended up here. And I was then, after the preparation, asked to head the group and act as president for MCJ Supply Chain Solutions’ joint venture between Mitsubishi, Caterpillar and Jungheinrich there to bring our robots here to our customers. And it’s been a great time here based out of Houston in Texas so far for almost two years now.

That’s awesome. That’s quite the story. So you’ve kind of been around, around the world a little bit and not only that, but just, I think it was interesting how you had the stint in marketing for a little bit. It sounds that you said you were writing, like customer case study, testimonial type content, articles. And then, if I understood correctly, so you were at Boston consulting before that, before the marketing agency, or?

That was an internship during my university time in Boston.

Ah, okay.

And that was a good learning and insight as well. And so that was a good internship there. And then as a freelancer at the end of the university time, and then full time really working for Jungheinrich then starting off after the PhD there.

That’s excellent. So obviously, you know, a lot of change has happened, in the industry over the last several years. You said, you’ve been with… for almost a dozen years, lots of change there, for sure. So, if you were to kind of look back over your career, obviously you’ve had several different career moves and lots of different experiences. Is there somebody that jumps out to you that has really made it a defining impact in your career? And it could be, maybe it was even somebody not inside your career path. It could be when you’re in school or during, do you have somebody that kind of jumps out at you?

Well, actually it’s one person but first of all, I think it’s very generic. What you read a lot in these books, but I fully believe in: that it’s the sum of all the bosses you have worked, really… is something which is really important. And I would really advise anyone to choose a job, not only from the task that you’re supposed to do the job description, but also who are you working for? What can you, how can you evaluate that? And what’s good and what’s bad about that. And to be able to learn and gather experience for yourself there. So it’s really different bosses that I have worked with. And one single event that has really learned me how the importance of feedback was actually at the Boston consulting group where I was as an intern, early twenties of age. They were tasked to create a big excel file and we were working on a post-merger integration. And so that was a big spreadsheet pulling in data from a database. And one of the senior consultants in the review for this task then came to me and said, “I have worked for Microsoft previously and I even joined the excel-lovers group,” or what they call it there. “I’ve seen many spreadsheets, but that’s really one of the best I have seen, you did a great job there.” And you can imagine how that really felt as a young star there, just starting your career as an internship. And that really taught me how important feedback is, that event and how important it is to really, let people know both constructive, how to improve, but also what went good and what’s good traits there in people. And that is something which I now try to pass on in mentoring younger folks. I think every age is suitable, whether you’re young, in the middle of your career or at the end of the career. It’s important to really give back and promote others. And we really support the heroes from tomorrow there.

Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s some great insights, But yeah, you mentioned the power of feedback and liked how you mentioned. It’s not just, obviously, like critical feedback, not critical in a negative sense, but even just in the sense of like constructive, but also another sense of like really shining, and identifying those positive, those moments as well, Just kind of uplifting. So that must’ve felt pretty darn good. Somebody who worked at Microsoft and this worker thought, you know, said, “Hey, that’s actually a pretty darn good sheet you’ve got there.” So that’s awesome. That’s awesome. So, moving forward a little bit, obviously, you’ve got a lot of experience in the industry and we were mentioning, there’s a lot of change, earlier. You know, talking about AGVs and AMRs and all the digital transformation that’s happening, all the robotics. The AI, the AR, the VR. Add anything with an “R” I guess, but the there’s just a lot happening right now. And then you add in the whole, like COVID thing that, which just seems like it’s just accelerating everything exponentially because of just huge need to be… What are some of the challenges that you’re seeing in the industry relative to some of the, maybe the changes?

Absolutely. I fully agree. It’s an exciting time. There was a lot of different change, really that’s there. And when you look back at whatever point in time you ask people, “How much change has there been in the past?” People were upset, even when the car was invented, wow. With the car, it’s a lot of things. But I think looking back at the past 10 or 20 years, it has been a tremendous impact for us. And now with the Covid-19 crisis, I fully agree there’s even more change. And I think one big trend in this industry is that you can reach everywhere. And it’s, I think, very strong demand for automation and digitalization. That is very clear that automation will benefit from this crisis where people see that a reliable supply chain is very important and the intralogistics parts. So having robots inside the warehouse is one piece of it.

And I think also those further automation that you can see in trucking and even planes operating fully automated or drones. I think all of that over the long run, will see a spike in demand and push in the developments. And for us in our industry, it has been an exciting road in the past already with keeping up with the growth. And I think that is one of the really big challenges there are. That’s right, now in the crisis, even though maybe the demand with a lot of clients goes down a little bit, other companies are already starting it. We see the different industries that are not hit as hard by the crisis, still have the time and budget to now invest and look into these automation projects and other industries like automotive or those that are hit harder there might just go out of it after the crisis, that is similar to what happened in the financial crisis, just when there is the light at the end of the tunnel.

Yeah.

That’s when really you say, “Okay, I plan for budgets and investing into automation and projects of this size.” So we’re looking forward to that. And coping with the growth has a lot of challenges that really all industries and all of the industry players, that is just normal things. When you grow significantly, double-digit numbers every year there, it is important to keep up with the structures, finding and then also retaining the good staff is very important. The talent, it’s one of the most important things there in this setup, where the digitalization automation, it’s a lot about expertise and customizing the solution, the fit to the customer and saying, “What’s really the demand the customer has.” And making that a perfect fit with the product offering. And that’s just something where the best people work together and building those solutions and a great thing to do.

Yeah, absolutely. And what I think is very fascinating, it’s interesting, you were mentioning there, you’re like automotive, for example, they’re taking a hit right now. And I’ll go ahead and preface this statement with you know, when we release your video here, which is probably going to be several weeks, I’m sure things will have changed a little bit by then, but maybe not so drastically. You mentioned the things are starting to kind of shift a little bit. It was interesting, March and April was just complete, I mean, frozen. And then you had industries that were just going nuts, right? And then you had other ones that were going down. But what I think is very, very interesting, we’re going to start seeing now, and we have seen is a lot of pivoting. I mean, obviously there was a huge pivoting from, we’re going to go from a manufacturing standpoint and it was all about the masks and the ventilators and all of these different things, and shifting and having the ability to be able to adjust to that, I think is critical. And, I think that that is one of the things that we’re going to start. We’re going to see a little bit more, you know, maybe put it into, lean manufacturing or, just the ability to be able to adapt. And especially that seems to be an interesting theme that I don’t think is going to go away for a little bit. And so I think the companies were starting to adjust to say, “We need to plan on flexibility. Our things are… We don’t know what it’s going to be like in the future, we have ideas and we hope.” But, what have you seen? Relative to that? Have you seen that?

I absolutely agree. The flexibility is very important in these setups as well. And that’s why it’s good that the… And you mentioned the different technologies there earlier on. What we have as robots today in the industry is far from what was decades ago and first AGVs that we’re following a inductive line there and just being very static. Nowadays, those AGV solutions that we have out there are all independent and have laser navigation, and it’s easy changes in the layout. So every customer that opts for an automation right now has the flexibility to change it and adapt it to their demand. And what we see is that especially those industries where the quality is important. That’s one of the big benefits you have in automation as well. Less damages with people. And even if the job market has a lot of people that, as the effect of this crisis as well, would be willing to drive in a forklift truck, they are untrained. And instead of training and damages, dealing with damages. Any repetitive tasks, anything where it is really off for… automating something which is standard, repeated where the quality is very important, turns off.

And also from the ROI perspective, it’s very interesting for a lot of people out there to make sure that supply chain operation is elevated to the next level and is crisis resistant and performs just what it’s supposed to do, but maintaining the flexibility once business grows. And you mentioned that Danny, that manufacturers of respirators, for example, they have a very high demand and also for those, it’s very important that they have an AGV installation to plug in another AGV, to increase the fleet size and be able to cope with more demand. So that’s why the flexibility of the systems it’s very important from the product and solution offerings that we have for the clients that are looking at those, but also for us as a company to see how can we help best the different industries and the different customers where there was a shift in the industry. And as you mentioned, some industries are quicker, some are slower. That’s very important to just adapt to that.

Yeah. And I think one of the cornerstones, one of the pieces to being able to help, to be able to adapt and have that flexibility very quickly, is this the sense of interoperability you mentioned, having to be able to quickly like, be able to deploy another robot, whether that’s a robot inside your ecosystem, or maybe it’s another AMR, or there’s some type of AGV. I know there’s a lot of talk right now about standardization and trying to develop some sort of standards. What’s your take on all that?

I agree. And that is driven by the automotive industries. And it’s a very important thing. The very first installation that we have installed here in North America is for the company TRUMPF and the smart factory near Chicago they have. And there we are actually operating alongside with a different AGV and interacting there with that other AGV. So that is becoming more and more, an important step there. And I agree that those standardizations and the systems need to tie together. Where, I still see a question mark, from the perspective where the industry trend is going is about this software layer that manages all of the AGV.

Right.

And that’s assuming, and I know, of course it sounds compelling at first to clients to say, “I have one system, and then I plugged 10 different kinds of AGVs in there.” But the importance really is the AGV is an intelligent piece of it, but the real intelligence is in the layer above it that controls everything, that avoids that these AMRs and robots one into a deadlock. That makes sure that all of the safety zones are observed and so on. And there, it gets really difficult if you break out the system to make sure you get the best out of it. And you break the boundaries really, when you say all of the different plug-in together, but who has the control over the complete fleets then? Would that be one of the vendors plugging in other machines, but that software wouldn’t know the functionality of that machine that well. So I think that is one crucial aspect that the industry will be working on. And that is just very transparent and to be solved in a similar way to just give you an analogy there. Also, we have seen a lot of drone delivery stories and companies developing in that space, and that is very good. And there has been really good use cases in rural areas, or even bringing medicine to islands or to people living in the mountain off-site. That is definitely a lot of good use cases. But imagine you being Atlanta, me here in Houston, that 20 different companies send drones around for delivery, there needs to be a completely new layer of air travel control for that as well. And that’s similar here. Yes, every startup that does a drone can do self autonomous flight and so on, but they can also stop and identify an obstacle and stop them.

Right.

But what if the airspace is occupied and we have that in the warehouses? So if the AGVs block each other, there needs to be one complete layer, which the vendors have and where everything works together, but there to open that up and tie other AGVs. And that’s one of the challenges for the future and this standardization topic.

Absolutely a big challenge for sure. And as a pilot, the drone story scares me a little bit, but no. Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, that’s a very complex , very complex challenge. I think it’s… One that we’re going to see, just as the way the industry is going, it’s going to be addressed and it’s going to be tackled. Be interesting to see what the final solutions kind of roll out to be. So but listen. So Kai, I’ve really enjoyed our conversation here. So for those who would love to learn more about MCJ and about your solutions, what’s the best way of them getting to know more about you?

Yeah. Actually you can follow us on LinkedIn, look up the page, or on the web: mcj.team. That also links to both the Jungheinrich and MCFA portfolio. So that’s really how people can find us and we’re happy to talk about customized solutions there helping the customers elevate their supply chains to automation and supply chain effectiveness.

Excellent. Well Kai, thank you so much. Thanks so much for your time. Be safe, be well. I hope everything, opens up more for you, as time kind of goes on, hopefully quickly.

Thanks Danny. Thanks for having me.

Anytime, thanks. All right. Well, there we go. We’re wrapping up today’s executive series with Kai Beckhaus who is the president, MCJ Supply Chain Solutions. So if you’d like to learn more about them, you go check them out. I believe the website was mcj.team. You can learn about all the innovations and the products that they’re kind of rolling out with.

That’s all I’ve got for you today. Thank you so much for listening or watching. I would encourage you, if you are… If you found us, if you’re listening to us on a podcast or you’re seeing us on social media or on our website, if you’re not our email list, I highly, highly, highly recommend you go to IndustrialSage.com. Get on our email list. There’s a lot of great content that’s coming out all the time. We’ve got webinars, we have news, we have executive series, we have other series that are rolling out as well and you don’t want to miss it. So that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thanks so much. And I’ll be back next week with another episode of IndustrialSage.

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All right, so let’s jump in today’s episode. I’m super excited we’ve got Sangram Vajre here from Terminus. He is the co-founder and chief evangelist. Sangram, thank you so much.

Excited to be here, man.

Well, we are super excited to have you here, so for those of you in the marketing space, if you haven’t heard of Sangram Vajre, FlipMyFunnel, Terminus, any of these things, then you are, well, you’re not a subscriber at all.

That’s a high praise, a high bar.

It is a high bar. And anyways, we are super excited for you to be able to come on.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I will get into this a little bit. For those who aren’t familiar with yourself and Terminus and FlipMyFunnel, all the million things you’ve got going on, can you just tell us, inform the uninformed about what you do and all that good stuff.

Sure. Well, I might start a little bit earlier than that so–

Perfect. Take us back.

Take us back. So went out 1979, when I was born,

Okay.

Nah, I’m just kidding!

Was it cold?

Yeah, we won’t go that far. But prior to starting Terminus, I ran marketing at Pardot.

Now, I’ve never heard of that company.

Oh yeah, that’s history, right?

Okay, great, yeah.

Then we got acquired by ExactTarget, and six months later, ExactTarget got acquired by Salesforce for $2.5 billion. So I went from this hundred-people company, itty-bitty based in Atlanta, to this giant iconic brand, Salesforce, and it was a great experience.

Six months, 12 months?

Yeah, in six months, right? So it was this back-to-back, double acquisition going on and I learned a lot about scale. I learned a lot about how Marc Benioff, and how do you create a movement, how you build a category, or how you think big. Really, it wasn’t about budget, it’s like, you’ve got to think big. So I learnt a lot about that, and I remember one day, we hit almost every single record of number of leads in the company,

Wow!

My head of sales came to me and said, “Sangram, that’s awesome! Your team crushed it!” I’m like, “Yeah, we did! The team is amazing!” and they’re like, “Next month, can you generate another thousand more leads?” Yeah, like so I just sank in my seat because I felt like at that moment, it was like, is marketing just a coin-operated lead machine, or do we even know who our target audience is? Do we have the leads just falling off? So all those things came through and then I met two of the co-founders of Terminus at, Eric Spett and Eric Vass, who just started Terminus three or six months ago and we just restructured, co-founded Terminus, and with this problem that we wanted to solve, which is no longer focused on leads, let’s focus on accounts, revenue, and those kind of things. Really, Terminus is an account-based platform, and that helps marketers and companies get in from the right accounts they want to sell. And FlipMyFunnel is a community that we build around this problem, not talking about the product but the problem.

I love it. So all right, for those who aren’t familiar with account-based marketing, what’s the basic tenets? What’s this all about?

There’s a lot of jargon out there, and there’s a lot. I wrote the very first book on account-based marketing. If somebody wants to go, they can go to Amazon and look for it. To simply define it, it is focused B2B marketing, and sales. And I say that with a lot of respect to everybody because I feel people think, okay, yeah, that’s what we do. No, people don’t do that. Most organizations have marketing and sales in siloed, and I don’t want to talk about alignment because that’s like okay, well, you’re not brothers and sisters trying to align. You need to work as one team, otherwise your company is going to just be out of the picture.

It’s just 100% right!

I’ve seen this over and over again. And marketing needs to really recognize that if you look at the sales team, the title of the sales people is what? An account executive. Not a lead executive, an account executive. So they’re always focused on accounts, so marketing needs to get behind and then say that we’re not just going to give them a lead, we’re going to give them the right leads and the accounts they care about. So really, in definition it’s really, how do I get focused on the list of accounts between marketing and sales and do everything I know to do in marketing for those accounts. Not just do a webinar a month, an e-book a month, and all those things, no, no, no. For you to do a webinar for the 10 accounts that we want to close. We will write an e-book for that industry because that industry matters to us, and it’s even though there are five, but those are million-dollar deals, we better work on those. So really look at all the different strategies that we have as marketers, and push it down and say, how can we make this available for the accounts that our sales team wants to close?

Absolutely.

That’s account-based marketing.

Yeah, that makes sense. It’s taking those personas, liking those fields, and saying, hey, instead of just kind of like, hey, we’re going to spray and pray, right?

Yeah.

It’s just focused on, hey, these are the guys, these are the look and feel that we want, these types of companies, the size whatever. Here’s all the challenges, here’s all the pinpoints, and then we can work out content around that.

The question I feel most people miss in this whole thing, it all sounds so, “Of course, we should be working together!” When we started Terminus, I realized this one thing. There is a number called sales and marketing efficiency, and that’s what you have to report on the financial statements of a company. So when the sales number goes up, marketing typically gets more budget. When the sales number goes down, the marketing budget is cut so this is just connected to each other. So as much as ICP and target, all that sounds right, it’s the mindset for the marketing team to recognize that if we don’t make our sales team successful, we’re fired. We’re gone. It’s a mindset that it’s not like, oh no, we do brand building, and we do events and amazing stuff. Yeah, that’s all great, as long as the revenue numbers are going up. The day they go down, this doesn’t matter.

No, you’re 100% right. We were talking about this post you put just the other day, so who knows when you’re watching this, it could be, last year. He had this great post, and I think it was hilarious, but it’s super true. It’s, well, hard truth. What was that post?

I was on a podcast and I just got really worked up and excited about this thing.

You get passionate?

A little bit, sometimes.

Okay, all right, all right.

And the conversation was like, “Well, sales need to show more respect to marketing.” And I’m a marketer, okay? So I should be like, “Yeah, yeah,” but I get upset when people say that because no! Did we know that salespeople have a quota every single month, and if they don’t meet that quota, they get fired? Do we recognize, have empathy for that? That’s why they have a sense of urgency. Marketing can go on like, “Hey, we’re going to go on an off-site for two days and come up with a campaign,” right? They don’t have the luxury to do it. So what I said in that post which seems to just go crazy was that marketers have never been punched in the face. Marketers get a budget handed to them saying that, “Here is X thousand or million dollars. Go build a brand, go drive leads for your sales team.” They don’t have to earn it. Sales have to earn their paycheck every single day. So I was like, “Guys, we’re fortunate that we have this budget. Now, let’s be super accountable and respectful to our sales team. Don’t ask why they don’t respect you. It’s not their fault, it’s your fault! You’re not doing something to earn the respect from them, who’s earning the bread every single day.” It’s something that we, as marketers, need to really recognize and empathize with.

Yeah, no, I agree 100% with it. I think, part of it, you talked about it being one team because if you’re not connected, from a marketing standpoint, if I don’t understand sales needs, I don’t understand the voice of the customer, they’ve got their ear on the ground. They know what the real challenges are and the pains. Go into your sales team being like, what’s the number one question you get asked every single day? No matter what it is, start there. That’s going to really help them versus, okay, well, let’s do this other really cool campaign that’s going to be whatever and it looks awesome.

Totally, totally. One of the things that if somebody is thinking, well, how do I get started with this thing?

Great.

How do I deal with account-based marketing? I’ll say find you a couple of sales reps that are always on and about and they’re always working with you, have good relationships with them. Don’t say, hey, we’re going to do account-based marketing, and we’re going to take over, no, no, no. Just start with those couple of people and say hey, you know what? Tell me who are your top 10 accounts that you’re trying to close this month or this quarter. That’s it. Tell me the top 10 accounts, do what you are doing, I’m going to give you air cover through either advertising, through direct mail, through events in those locations or maybe create content really just for those 10 accounts. Just tell me who they are, see what happens, and as soon as they see engagement and interest in it, they’re going to tell every single person on the sales team, these guys are awesome. We need everyone’s account on it. So I think people can start with account-based marketing at a much one-to-one level with the reps that they have good relationships with, and then expand it to everybody else as opposed to, I think that’s the biggest mistake I’ve seen. It sounds so good to do, people are just like, yeah, let’s just throw away leads and we’re just going to do ABM all day long. No, you can’t really change the entire organization overnight. You have to show success, you’re going to learn, you’re going to make mistakes. You’re not going to have the results you want as quickly as you want, so you need to hinge all of your bets around that. So start with the best sales reps that you have a relationship with, and then you can show success with them, and they will be the people who will be sharing with everybody else.

Yeah, absolutely, then you scale it.

Right, you’re right.

“All right, hey, well, this worked over here, and let’s go.” I love the analogy, you’ve got air cover. Think of maybe military terms or whatever and you’ve got a team. You’ve got teams that have all the different specialties on them. It’s no different. Yeah, maybe you’ve got a sales team but you’ve got sales, then you’ve got marketing there, you’ve got a product team, you’ve got all these–

Yeah, customer success.

Exactly! All right. That all needs to be aligned, like hey, together, as a whole, this where we’re going to go, or a chunk of it and focus on it. I think another big challenge is that, hey, you have a budget and it’s never what you wanted. I don’t know. I haven’t talked to one marketer that’s like, “I got everything I wanted! This is amazing!” Never, never happens. So it’s a big challenge. How do you focus? Where do you put the dollars to get that? And here’s the other thing. How do you unlock more revenues or more budget? You talked about that a little before.

100%. I think, most marketers or most organizations put marketing in a demand gen box And the reason they put it in a demand gen box is because marketers, they just feel like that’s what they can do. Generate more leads, build more brand, newsletter, email, whatever, demand gen. But what I’ve noticed quite honestly in the last four years of just being and working on ABM as a strategy is actually the money is, no matter what, the color of money is still green, right? So if you can work on pipeline velocity, which means when a deal says, hey, I’m ready to buy from you or your competitor, right? At that time, if marketing can provide that air cover to them, sales is going to be all over it. Your CFO, CEO, everybody is already looking at those deals, so imagine as marketing is saying, “Hey, we’re going to give air cover to the accounts that are in our pipeline.” Or let’s say–

Accelerate it, yeah.

Accelerate those, right? Even if you accelerate by a month, or a week, that’s like millions at the end of the day. And the second strategy is customer marketing. A lot of companies have more than one product to sell. You already know the customer, you already have built trust, they already have a relationship there, you already understand their pinpoints, now, let’s just start doing more upsell and cross-sell. I like to call it up-serving them because you know so much more about them. That’s ABM. So ABM helps marketers to really go beyond the demand generation box and get into more of the business outcomes. And again, that helps, from a career perspective, I think that’s just good.

Absolutely! No, it makes a lot of sense. How do I put this? It’s more of having that real business discussion.

Yes.

Or providing real value of, look, brand is super important. It’s very important. Got to have it, right? But at the end of the day, these are businesses and its all about the P and L. What we’re doing, we have to show what we’re getting out of that.

Totally.

And then it–

Yeah. I interviewed somebody on FlipMyFunnel podcast, Tim Kopp, who was the CMO of ExactTarget when they went public and then got acquired by Salesforce. And Tim shared something that I’ll never forget. He said that, “Look, brand drives demand.” 100%. If you have great branding, you think about Salesforce, you think about all these big companies that have great brand, but don’t confuse that with the fact that if you’re starting off and you have no credibility internally, you can’t build a brand.

Yeah, that’s true.

You need to build the basic blocking and tackling around things, and the ABM allows you to do that and once you get to a point that you actually are able to create trust with your sales counterparts, then you start building brand because that’s when you can charge premium for it. You can get and do these bigger deals and things like that. So that is to your point, I love that you brought that up. It’s super important. You can’t do that without having sales marketing working as one team as you said.

Yeah, no, exactly. 100%. All right, I’ve got a quick question for you. So in previous interviews we had Shonodeep Modak. He’s the chief marketing officer for North America for Schneider Electric. He was in the previous episode, or one of the previous episodes. Not exactly sure when these are going to release so probably, right.

Yeah, its awesome. You’re like, I’m just talking to people, I don’t know when they’re going to go live.

I don’t know.

You’re just–

Yeah, exactly. We were talking about one of the top challenges for chief marketing officers specifically in the industrial manufacturing space. What are you seeing?

Oh, the top challenges for CMOs, I feel it really goes back to just trust. When I think, the organizations have more budget, the CMOs have more budget than they ever dreamt of, right?

Yeah.

That’s just the reality of it. At the same time, if you look at Scott Brinker’s technology landscape, there are more technology tools out there than ever before.

Ooh, squirrel!

Yeah! 8,000 of them, right?

Right, yeah.

And then on top of all that, marketing is a specific organization within all different business units where it’s very specialized. Every single person for the most part is very specialized. If you’re a CTO you say, “Oh, I like that engineering, that skillset, hire 10 of them.” Or customer success: “Oh, I love the way this person, let’s just hire more of the people from the same industry.” You can’t do that in marketing. Graphics person, a content person, a product marketing person, a videographer. These skill sets are very, very siloed, so it’s different and difficult to scale that as a business unit.

So the biggest thing a marketing organization or CMO needs to do is build trust and build trust with not only the sales team, but also the product team, and make sure that that’s happening. Your CEO, there’s always something going on that everybody points to the CMO to go fix. “Hey, a brand is not good enough, CMO, fix it.” “Oh, our sales numbers are down. CMO, where are the leads?” “Oh, people don’t know what a rebound positioning is. Maybe we need to go and do something else.” “CMO, what’s going on with the press releases?” So you are under fire all the time on all different things so the most, the best thing you can do is build trust and I think the best way to build trust is to over communicate on here are the things we’re doing, but more importantly, here are the things we’re not doing. And I think I have learned that being at Pardot, Salesforce, Terminus, all these things. By sharing openly, transparently what am I doing and what I’m not doing because of these reasons is so important. It’s so important.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. No, that’s great. So to kind of ping pong a little bit, and you kind of talked about a little bit before how to get started with ABM? With manufacturing, a lot of challenges they have is that, well, a couple of different things. A real big thing is there’s a lot of fear about kind of making shifts, getting into digitals, the whole I don’t know. And then the other piece is really, sometimes you have multiple audiences. So for example, a lot of these guys are selling through channel partners or distributors or something, so you’re not necessarily selling directly to the end user. We’ve got to sell the channel partner on working with us, and then we’ve got to sell the end user, but through or over or all that stuff. Bearing that in mind, what are some quick steps in terms of being able to roll this out?

I hear that all the time, man. We were talking to our common friend Vance, he’s in healthcare, so I feel like similar challenges they have over there too. I think for the most part, the sales team in your organization is already doing account-based because that’s the title that they know, these are my big deals, and if your organization has big deals, a complex sales cycle, multiple decision makers, ABM is something that’s already happening. You want it or not, you like it or not, it doesn’t really matter, that’s already happening in your organization. As a marketing team, you’re probably just figuring out, okay, how do I get myself into this process so I can help them. But one of the easiest things I feel most organizations can do, especially in the manufacturing world is to identify your total addressable market, my top five, 10, 50 accounts, and get alignment with the entire organization that if you win these top 50 accounts, would we have a better brand? Would we have more revenue? Would we have more ability to do whatever we want to do?

What would that look like, yeah.

What would that look like? You’ll be surprised how few organizations know what their total investment market looks like. Everyone feels like, yeah, the whole world is my customer. No, you’re not selling a Nike shoe, you’re selling a very specific, high-value, mega deal size that are probably 100, 200, 300, 400 companies but that’s it. You’ll be surprised when you ask your internal organization. That’s a challenge for everybody is that go and find out what your total addressable market really looks like and once you know that, figure out who you want to go after.

I see.

Tier them up, tier one, tier two, tier three, who you want to go after. I think all those strategies come out later, but, what are you going after, really? That’s a big part.

That makes sense. Well, listen, I really appreciate this. This has been awesome. I feel like we can probably go for hours.

Yeah! We can just talk about this forever.

As we’re kind of wrapping up, is there anything else you’d like to leave with our audience? Any little tips or anything that’s on your heart?

Yeah, on my heart like the punch-in-the-face thing.

The punch-in-the-face thing, right.

I feel that marketing is a discipline where you get to change the emotions of people, right? So we have been given this responsibility to do that and really matters how seriously we take that. As much as we talked about accounts and leads, and all these different things, it’s all going to fall flat if you don’t have a good story to tell. So I think the number one thing that I pride ourselves on, or what we’ve tried to do at Terminus and FlipMyFunnel, and all those things and the companies that I look up to, if you’d really think about it, they’re amazing storytellers. So my challenge to everybody is that, what’s your story? Come up with a story that makes sense to you, that makes sense to your customers and tell that story in a way that’s going to make them emotionally charged up for you. Otherwise, you’ll always be in the feature function war and all going to be in the product war as opposed to be someone who’s building a category, leading a movement, or at least focus on the problems of your customer but you can’t do that if you don’t have a good narrative, a good story, so that’s my big challenge for everybody.

Love it! Storytelling, we’re really big on that. So, thank you so much. This is awesome. I love it.

Thank you for having me.

If anyone has any questions they’d love to ask, I’m sure you’re probably very hard to get ahold of.

Not really! Not really! Nah, I’m on LinkedIn, I love LinkedIn. I feel it’s a great, great channel, so you can just look my name up on LinkedIn, Sangram Vajre.

Perfect. All right, thanks again. I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much, man.

It’s awesome. Okay, well, there you go. We had the awesome Sangram Vajre on. And man, there’s a lot of great insights so if it’s something you’re thinking about, from ABM, account-based marketing, hopefully you kind of were able to unpack that a little bit. Essentially, really it’s just distilling and really focusing, if anything else. Here are our top accounts we want to get into. And where do we get that information? We’re going to get that aligning with sales, and looking at from a company as a whole, I love how Sangram talked about. You’d be really surprised by how many organizations haven’t done that. They don’t really understand or really know what that addressable market is. Maybe that would be a great exercise to be able to do that and be able to say, hey, for a marketing organization, how can we support you in that maybe we’ve got some of the really close to making that decision from a marketing standpoint, what are we able to do to be able to help reduce that life cycle, that sales cycle and shorten it?

So a lot of things to unpack here, a couple quick steps is sit down with your sales team, find out what they’re doing, find out the accounts they’re trying to get into, and then see how you can sort of reverse engineer that. So we’re all about engineering here and manufacturing. And figure out what can we do to be able to help that and really make that impact on that P and L? All right, so okay.

So that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thanks so much for watching. If you have any questions, we’d love to answer ’em for you at IndustrialSage.com/questions. If you’re listening on any of the iTunes or Stitcher, or any other podcasting tools we’ve got out there, we’d love a review. On social media, post, share, like, tweet, all that good stuff would be awesome. And last but not least, if you’re not on our subscriber list, you need to go to IndustrialSage.com right now, get on there because we have all kinds of great tools like the insights that we did. If you haven’t done this, talk to 150 manufacturers and learn about all their sales and marketing trends. Do it. There’s a lot of other valuable resources we have there that you can check out. So, I’m done, phew! Flapping my gums and I will catch you next week. I’m Danny with IndustrialSage. Thanks for watching.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

Hey, welcome to IndustrialSage, today I’ve got a special treat for you, I’m going to be talking with Nathan Williams, who is the CEO and founder of MineSpider. And we’re going to be talking about blockchain in the supply chain. So let’s jump into it, Nathan thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much Danny for having me on the show.

Our pleasure, you know, but first for those who aren’t familiar with MineSpider, tell us what you guys do.

So MineSpider is doing blockchain, supply chain traceability. So what we do is we create digital passports for raw materials that travel along the supply chain with the raw material so they get stamped along the way, data gets uploaded so that you have a better picture of what you’re buying, where it came from and under what conditions it was produced. And so blockchain is a rather integral part of what we do because it solves a key problem of trust, that when you received this data about what you’re buying, you know that the data was not altered, that no matter how many hands it went through that it is your data and that it is unchangeable and that it can prove the authenticity of what you were buying.

Great, you know, and there’s a lot of misinformation around blockchain, so, you know, we’ll start right there, the basics, what is it?

So blockchain was, is this technology that was created to solve this problem of trust, picture it back in 2008, when we had this financial crisis and people had trouble trusting banks for good reason, there was a big financial crisis and it had to do with certain groups of people who have more control over making financial rules than others. And there was a group of crypto anarchists who said, “Well, what does the bank do? They’re just a group that keeps track of a ledger, a ledger of transactions of who owns what. Could we keep track of that ledger amongst ourselves without having a trusted third party.” The problem, of course, if everyone participating is keeping track of the ledger amongst themselves, is, what do you do in case the ledgers different? Under the traditional system that bank would have the real version and so we could compare our own records to the bank. But because there’s no authoritative bank you need, it’s really not an easy problem to solve. So what, there was a fellow or maybe a group of people under a pseudonym, we’re not sure, named Satoshi Nakamoto, who came up with a rather elegant solution to this problem. So the solution was instead of a continuous ledger, we break that ledger into blocks and then we link blocks together and secure them so that they can’t be changed and it gets a little technical. Each of these blocks contains 4,000 transactions and then you add a what’s called a mystery number and you basically run and hash all of that together to make a code. If anyone goes and changes a transaction then it would affect the next block in the ledger, so they would have to fix that block and then the next one, and then the next one.

And so all of the participants, all of the people that are keeping track of the real record of transactions, will always have more blocks in their chain than someone who goes and tries to fiddle with the record and chain cause it’ll be broken. So essentially all of all of the participants are what are called nodes, they’re their computers that are keeping track of this real sequence of transactions, and so as a result, you’ve got this bank account essentially that can’t be changed that doesn’t have an authority figure. Now if you have a bank transaction, you have a memo field and in that memo field you can put a piece of data. Well, because you can do that, you can put in data that you don’t want to be changed. And so what we do is we put in these transactions, encoded data about supply chain history so that that can’t change. And then we encrypted in a certain way so that only the data owner has access to it. And so it’s this nested technology that makes it so that you are in total control of your data, but there’s no bank, or no central authority, or no central company, or government that has backdoor access to it.

That makes sense, so, you know, even though it originated in the finance space, what value do you see it bringing to the supply chain industry?

Blockchains’ real use is making unique digital items and usually if you think of a digital item, you think of a photograph or a movie or a sound file that can be copied a million times and sent to anyone you want, but with blockchain, you know which one is the original and you know if it’s a copy or not or if it’s fake or if it’s duplicated. And so, this can be useful for creating coins that hold financial value, or it can be useful for creating unique documents that you want to not change or licensing of intellectual property because you know which is the original and legal and licensing, which ones are not. So the way you can use this in a supply chain is you can create a digital certificate. So you imagine this digital certificate can operate like a passport, That’s the way I often describe it, it’s it’s unique, you can’t duplicate it, it can be good, say, for a ton of metal or for a shirt or for a car or for a battery and it can have a unique code that is embedded into the object or the material itself or on a sticker, so that you can see which ones it relates to and then it can keep track of who held it and data they want to upload. Maybe they want to upload their government licenses, or third party audits, or data about their relationship with the community and maybe even school records to prove that the children were all in school and not working in the mine, or, what other data is needed in order to prove it is responsible. And so that data is then attached to this digital item or this certificate and is unable to be changed and so that can give the buyer a much clearer picture of who’s in their supply chain of what is going on and who’s not supplying data and whether it might want to take action or request more.

So, if I’m a manufacturer buying raw goods like, let’s say fruit, do I assign a digital certificate to that shipment or to each individual item? Like how does it work?

It all depends on the problem you want to solve, right? And so this is a very, we’re talking about global supply chains for global shipments of every good that we’re talking about, So each one is going to have different challenges. And so you would use a method that would solve the problem you want to solve, So if you were getting fruit, maybe what you’re concerned about is that it was kept at the correct temperature, the entire length of the chain

Yeah.

And that the people at the beginning of the chain were paid properly. And so then, it’s not as concerning to you, maybe, that someone took some fruit from a different place and subbed it in, what’s concerning to you is the operations of the company along the way and or maybe it is concerning if you’re, or maybe if you move into pharmaceuticals, it is more concerning that you’re getting is what it says it is. And so, then, in the fruit case, maybe, it’s enough to have a little IOT device that collects temperature along the way,

Okay, yeah.

Maybe, for metal, you don’t need that, you just need a QR code that says, “Okay, this is where it comes from,” and then the data attached to it, will tell you the composition, then you can use that as a fingerprint. So there are different ways depending on how important it is to know exactly what you’re receiving. The way we do it, we wanted to be flexible to accommodate anything. And so, our sort of default is very lightweight, you put a QR code because if you receive a shipment, your first thought is what data is attached to it and you want to be able to look up the data and the record. And if you’ve got the data in the record, you will probably have data within that, that’ll help you identify the shipment itself. Now, depending on the risks you’re going to include data, like an IOT device or an RFID that gets automatically scanned, So that was automatic instead of manually entered. So there’s different things you can do to add layers of security.

Okay, that makes sense. So then, you know, what is this big fancy word that, you know, blockchain interoperability in relation to supply chain?

Ooh, it’s a big topic, I’ll tell you that, everyone is interested in blockchain interoperability. I’m probably the most skeptical about it, of people that you will speak to. Blockchain interoperability is basically how do you get two blockchains to talk to each other? And in some it’s complicated, that’s where it comes down to is it’s really a complicated thing to actually do because blockchain is already interoperability between different computers, It has a way of making sure two computers or five computers or a hundred computers have the record of the same data, it’s like the internet. And so blockchain interoperability is sort of like saying internet interoperability: “If we have 15 internets, can we get them to talk?” Well, we can, and it might defeat the purpose of having an internet in the first place. So essentially the reason it is a hot topic, especially in the supply chain space is because you want competition, this is normal, everyone wants competition, no one wants one company to own the supply chain space and to have total vision, over the entire global supply chains, that’s a lot of power to give a private company. And the solution that people talk about is getting multiple competing companies, running their blockchains to talk to each other. I don’t think that’s the best solution, but it is what is very talked about.

The reason I don’t think it is the best solution is because a blockchain makes sure that the transactions in the block are unchanged by copying among every computer that’s participating. So if I’ve got five computers or five million computers in my blockchain and you’ve got five million computers in your blockchain, and I want to take a transaction off of my blockchain and put her on yours, maybe, because someone sent a ton of material from company A to company B, company A uses my blockchain company, B used as yours, the problem is I have to register that that ton went to company B on my blockchain, you have to register that it came from company A on your blockchain, but anyone using your blockchain, can’t see my blockchain. So that’s, as far as you can see, you no longer see the rest of the supply chain. Now we could copy all of my information from my blockchain to your blockchain, but then technically you’re using my blockchain. We’re using the same blockchain at that point, because your computers now have a copy of all my data and my computers have a copy of yours. And so that’s why it can be really, really difficult because you don’t want these broken chains.

From my perspective, the solution to this is the same solution we came to with the internet, there’s not one company that owns and runs the internet, there are multiple. And some of them are government institution run, some of them are private company run, and there’s a whole host of service providers at the lower end that provide the services but they use the same protocols. There’s one intranet, you use HTML, you use TCP IP and all of these protocols, you don’t have interoperability between 15, 20 different internets. And I think that that ultimately will be the solution, I don’t think we’re there yet, but I think that what needs to happen is that the people make their money on apps, built on top of a supply chain ball chain and then multiple companies will run nodes of the same protocol. I think that’s in our future, but I think that we’re a few years out from that at best, cause we haven’t sort of, we haven’t come to one universal standard yet, it’s a complicated field.

So it’s a standards issue. You know, mentioned this could diminish competition, are you suggesting that I could use this to access like competitor data?

No, not at all, the way we designed MineSpider, we were thinking of this when we designed and so I’m not claiming that we’ve solved every problem, but this is definitely one we’ve thought about. The question of, how can you get competitors in the same supply chain to share data, but not see each others’ data?

But not see, okay, gotcha, yeah.

So the way that we’ve approached this problem is, first of all, we use a what’s called a layering system, So each passport has layers, it has a private layer that’s encrypted invisible to you and your customers, you have a transparency that’s visible to everyone in the same supply chain but not visible to everyone, you need a key to access it and then, or you need to hold this passport to access it. And then you have a public layer. And this public layer is visible to everyone who uses the system. And so the public layer would have encrypted data, So you could see the passport exists encrypted but you can’t read it. And you would have maybe the material type and how much material is in the passport. So if she’s a passport is good for one ton of tin, then you would be able to see everyone is able to see that and that’s how you know it’s unchanged, but you wouldn’t see who it was sent to and from, I wouldn’t be able to divine or even date, we’d actually designed it so that you can’t data mine it and identify your competitors suppliers. So even though it’s public access and it’s an open protocol. So a lot of design work went into this to avoid having a central authority but to be able that competitors could use this without running into these antitrust issues.

So it’s not as if I can see frequency of shipments or other details.

Sort of it, because it is still anonymized, right? So you could see that certain addresses have a certain frequency of shipments, but you also don’t know if the sending of the data is lined up in time with the sending of the shipments itself, you don’t know necessarily who owns which address and you also don’t know where they’re going to. So we’ve taken a lot of care to make sure that there’s a lot of anonymity where it needs to be. And that when people are able to see the data, it’s because it’s being granted by the data owner.

That makes sense, so, you know, now for one big question, why do we need to go in this direction? Why is it so important?

I think that everyone has a right to know what they’re buying, and I think that everyone sort of feels that, but they felt a little bit powerless to make informed choices, they look at two cell phones or two batteries or whatever and they know if one’s better than the other and if one is, they don’t know which one is which and companies have that same problem. And especially now with supply chains being disrupted by the COVID pandemic, companies are looking and saying, “Well, it’s not just I want to know my materials in my raw inputs are responsible, I also want to know that I will have them tomorrow, I want to know that they are, that I’m not accidentally modeled sourcing, you know. I might be buying from five different companies who are all buying from one supplier and if that supplier runs into a problem, I run into a problem and I won’t even know it.” And so I think that this has moved from something people have said, “It’s important, I’ll deal with it at some point,” to something that has become urgent. And so now people are in crisis mode and that won’t last forever, but what will be the focus of the mid to the long-term is companies are going to want to know, who are my tier two suppliers? Who are my tier threes? And maybe I can go even beyond that and get a better sense of what I’m dealing with and what the risks to my business are.

You know, that makes a lot of sense especially nowadays. So, you know, looking ahead to see if, you know, when this virus is over, what are some challenges or lessons or changes in supply chain that you see happening?

I think post-Coronavirus, we’re going to see companies taking more action to be a bit more robust and resilient against these sort of force majeure events so that they’re not caught off guard. Part of it might be keeping more stock and being willing to trade off, that’s there just in time operations for having more stock, and they’re probably going to want to know how much stock their suppliers are keeping. So this is probably going to be one area that gets built up is especially for large companies that have very complex products, they’re probably going to require their suppliers to have a certain level of stock so that they aren’t caught off guard.

Yeah.

And I imagine that being pushed down, not just to their tier one suppliers but to their tier two suppliers that they’re going to require their tier one suppliers to do the same. I also imagine that post-Corona, we’re going to see, more need for automation, contactless, shipping receiving and we’re especially things like inspection, things that reduce the paperwork to reduce the amount of contact time, because I don’t think even after lockdowns are eased that we’re going to necessarily be out of the Corona problem. We hear reports that it could be quite a long time before a vaccine is ready and so just because the economy is returning, doesn’t necessarily mean that people are going to want to handshake to spend a lot of time together and so I can imagine contact with systems, less paperwork, less signing, less handing of pens, digital signing, things that streamline the handoff process to be very important.

And this is where blockchain shines, of course, because you can have an authentic, an authenticity guarantee of a digital signature, for example, or of a legal paper, so I’m imagining a lot of development in this area. In addition, I also see a big need for a critical component provenance. So if you’ve got critical materials and components that they’re not all coming from the same region, especially for better or for worse, I’m imagining a further nationalization of critical components. So we’re already seeing this with protective equipment PPE for medical workers, ventilators, that sort of thing that countries want to make sure that there’s a stock of them. And I think that this type of nationalization of critical industries, whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, it’s a thing that’s going to happen. And so by seeing, okay, who are we buying from? Who are our suppliers? And are they all from one region or do we have a diversity? So that we’re safer. That’s going to be a question that’s on not just industrial minds, but government minds as well.

You know, yeah, a lot, even in the 90s, you know, globalization was a huge shift with huge ramifications, and now energy. Like what effects good and bad do you see coming out of this pendulum shift?

I think one other thing that we’re seeing as well is, there’s always been sort of an assumption among everyone in the entire economy that someone knows what’s going on. And I think that with the coronavirus, what we’ve seen is that is not necessarily the case. People are very reactive.

Yeah.

There has been some planning in advance. But by and large, people are reacting to the situation that they’re given, and there’s not necessarily one person that knows more than anyone else what the next step is or what is going on. And so the appropriate response to that would be to get more information, to get better data, to get a better sense of what is critical to my business, to make sure that you don’t get caught off guard, because we can’t just trust everyone else to handle it for us.

Right, exactly. Well, Nathan, I really appreciate your time and help today in breaking down blockchain, so that, you know, a lot of people can learn from it. You know, what it is, and importantly, what it isn’t.

Well, thank you very much for having me on the show. It is a complicated topic, and I think that we’re in a position as an industry, where the potential of blockchain to underpin a lot of use cases and functions that regular business uses every day is huge, it’s going to be like the internet, in that, the average person doesn’t understand how it works, but because it how’s it works, we’re going to see this push over the next decade, where blockchain is just going to be silently in the background running a lot of our trusted infrastructure. And it’s important that we start understanding it now while it’s still sort of the early days, so that we’re not sort of caught off guard and drifting along with the changes.

That makes a lot of sense. So, for those who’d like to learn more about your company, where can they find more information?

www.mindspider.com.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much.

Thanks so much, Danny, for having me on the show.

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So, all right, well, let’s go ahead and dive in. How are we going to use video content, especially that MODEX video content that you guys have, to generate leads and help with your sales process? So here’s our agenda. Lots of great information we’re going to go through. We have our state of the industry, so just some data points that I want to share with you at the beginning to really set the tone of why this is such important information for you to be able to leverage within your sales and marketing. So a little bit about IndustrialSage, so we’re an open platform and we’re making our platform available for people like yourselves, organizations like yourselves, to be able to get in front of your ideal buyer. So I won’t bore you with all the details right now. But there’s a lot of very innovative ways, things that you have never seen before, within the industrial industry that we are leveraging, things that we’re doing.

We are not your typical trade publication, okay? Valuable resource, but we are creating content, publishing content that really enables people to take action, do things, so go into some more detail later on. Obviously I’m available anytime to discuss that in more particular terms for your company. So, we interviewed 150 organizations at MODEX. Super excited, I mean, this is just a massive list I’m so excited to have. A lot of you on this list here on the webinar right now. So this is great. Very excited. We’ve seen thousands of views on these videos, so very, very happy with the results, and there’s still more being published. We haven’t even finished editing all 150 of them, so they’re coming along.

All right, without further ado, let’s dive into some data points. So the average user is spending 88 percent more time on a website when it has video on it. So this is why your video is very important. We’re spending more time on your website. When you include that video within your email campaigns, we’re seeing a 200 percent, 300 percent increase in the click-through rate. I mean, this is fascinating. So then, it’s not just the how-to videos and maybe lower-level people within an organization watching this video content. We’re seeing a massive number of executives that are watching video content. And look at this: at least once a week. So it’s not like they’re watching it once a month. It’s at least once a week, so this is very good. The B2B buyer, they’re watching 30 minutes of video content. So I understand that the free video that was filmed and published and edited for MODEX is about 60 seconds; some are a little bit longer, some are a little bit shorter. That’s just one piece of the pie, of that 30 minutes of video that you really need to have available within your organization. So whether that’s on your YouTube channel, your homepage, or any blog articles on your website, all of that, it all is totaling up to that number of 30 minutes that people are spending watching that video content. And it’s influencing their purchase decision. So that’s what I want to be able to do. We’re going to show you how you can help influence people’s purchase decision with these videos.

So, and then this one’s very interesting. I’m right there on the edge of not being a millennial. Thank goodness, to a degree, but 50 percent B2B buyers now are millennial. And so, they are consuming video at an insane rate. It’s how they buy. It’s how they’re consuming content and being informed and educated, so this is where this video is very, very important. All right, let’s get into some more practical tactical content here, so how are we going to share this video content? Because we all have a variety of follower accounts on our business pages. But maybe you’re not able to reach all of them. Or you want to be able to get in front of even more people than that.

So we see, maybe some of you guys have seen some of these slides before from a couple of other webinars we’ve done, but they’re very important to set the tone. So social media is that new water cooler, okay? Before, you would have that interaction in the office and engagement, some ideation happening. Now that is happening on social media. A lot of us aren’t in the offices right now. So that’s where this whole ecosystem is. People are spending more time there. So, then, with this video, you want to share it with everyone. Everyone as possible, so you look at this graphic where this person’s connected to that person and that person and that person, you hear the philosophy, “six degrees of separation.” Well, you’re connected to somebody else that to somebody else, and so forth that you’re really trying to reach. So that’s why that social element is so powerful.

So let’s look at some numbers. All right, the average LinkedIn user has 400 connections, okay? So if you think about it, when you share a video or share a piece of content, not all 400 connections are going to see that content. It’s going to depend on obviously the total number of connections you have, how engaged they are, how many connections they have, and so forth that goes into this wonderful algorithm of LinkedIn. So the next piece is, well, if I share that video, I’m getting in front of most likely 10 percent of my total connections. Maybe higher, maybe lower. Well, this is where, if you have your team share the video, then you’re further amplifying your total company reach. So you might have a couple hundred, maybe a couple thousand or tens of thousands of followers on LinkedIn for your company page, but think of how many employees you have. So when you’re able to amplify it, so looking at five team members, just getting in front of 10 percent of their connections is 200 impressions. And so forth, you know? The numbers, they get bigger and bigger and bigger. So these are just some examples but this is essentially free reach. So you’re able to get in front of more people simply by sharing it, and now I’m going to show you how simple it is to share.

So given you are the marketer, the savvy salesperson, with all this on this webinar, these things are going to most likely come a little bit more intuitive to you. But I want to add another element, so you’re going to share it, but a lot of times, people maybe aren’t as, what do you say, talented, so to speak, or really use social media that much, okay, especially on LinkedIn. So what we recommend is getting that post, the shared post-link, okay? And emailing it to your team with just a simple “Please share this video with your LinkedIn connections.” So when they click that link, it is going to bring up the video that you just shared with them, and then they can hit share. So it’s very, very simple. They make it as easy as possible. Now I want it to be even easier on how to share and amplify this message. So you’re taking this video and you’re sharing it, they’re sharing it, and so forth, and maybe their connections share it also. This should be great value.

So next is an example of the type of engagement that you can see when you share your video. So this is an interview that we did with Tim Vargo from Exide and he came into the studios on our executive series where we interview executives, and the feedback that he received, and I can share this out, because I know it’s scrolling pretty quickly; you can’t see it, maybe read all the comments very well. But it not only helped him reach his customer base, but this particular example is showing how much his employees respect him. And appreciate what he’s doing for their organization, so there’s a lot of different ways that this piece of content can help influence things and influence people, so there we go. Share that out there. Leverage this engagement. When you see these being shared, go through each of the comments, make a comment that further helps amplify it. When LinkedIn sees that engagement happening on a video, it’s more likely to be displayed and incorporated into someone else’s organic feed, on their newsfeed. So like the other comments. Make a comment. Engage. Tag other people. So maybe someone that you’re trying to get in front of, tag them, “Hey, you’ve got to watch this video that we filmed at MODEX that talks about what we were talking about the other day,” and whatnot.

And you can do this not only with your branded content, okay? But also, any valuable video resource that you find out there. So, something that’s maybe from a third party resource, a news article, a news video that’s incorporating some element within the industry that’s going to bring value to them, do that and share that content. So next, creating a page on your website with the video. So, I realize that there’s a lot of different platforms, content management systems, that organizations are using and so, I don’t want to really deep dive into the nitty gritty of this is how to take it and put it on the WordPress or Drupal or HubSpot CMS or whatever, Squarespace or whatever those platforms are. Additionally, your IT team probably handles a lot of those things, maybe you don’t touch those different elements. So I don’t go into that. But what you need to do is, if you haven’t already received your video via email announcing when it’s going to be published on social, you can also go to industrialsage.com/MODEX and you can see all the videos that have been published. So not all of them are done. So we’re working overtime, trying to get all of these videos edited. There’s a lot of videos. Over 150. And we want them all to be spectacular, so we’re not rushing anything out.

So go to the site, watch the other videos, see what your competitors are doing; that’s always nice to do. And then find your video. And when you go, when you find your video, you can click through to it, and within the video, here’s how to get the video embed code. So you have to click play and that will bring up the controls there at the bottom of the player. And in the bottom right corner, there is a little button that looks like a little sharer arrow and you click that and it brings up another little dialogue that says embed. When you click that button, it’s going to automatically copy and paste. Copy that code onto your clipboard and then you can paste it into your webpage, so the code will look like that in the bottom right corner of that little black box that’s there, so a very simple process. It then pulls in all the video stuff. It works on mobile. It resizes automatically. If you’re at high bandwidth, HD will play; if it’s low bandwidth, then it’ll automatically go to a lower resolution to be able to play in the best format possible. So get that embed code, and then go over and embed it onto your site.

So here’s an example that Waypoint Robotics did with their video from 2018, so, we didn’t interview 150 organizations, but we interviewed quite a few in 2018 at MODEX. And they took their video, embedded it onto a page. I kind of cut out a lot of the content so I could highlight some of the different pieces on there that I want to talk about, but they put that video embed on there and then they included additional content around the MODEX experience that they had, a lot of the different products that they were showcasing, so it’s a valuable article. And then they include a wonderful call-to-action at the bottom, and this is where you’re saying, “Okay, well, how does this all help me generate leads?” Well, you’ve done your organic sharing of the video on social. You share this page on social. So you’re doing that, and then you have that call-to-action there towards the bottom, and, okay, so Waypoint is using what I would consider a very bottom of the funnel call-to-action, where it’s really asking, “Do you have a project? We’re here to help you.” So not a lot of room for someone that’s still in that consideration phase. So very bottom of the funnel. I would recommend on an article like this, seeing some type of downloadable offer, so maybe a free resource, a brochure of some type, with only maybe a couple fields that they need to enter so first name and email address, something very low calorie, so to speak, to get that initial lead generation started. Or maybe a webinar or another video resource of some sort. That way, you’re reaching a much broader audience than just those that are much more further down that sales process.

So this is a great example of a blog article, recap article, that they did for MODEX. This is something that PAC Machinery did and I love that they did this because here you have a video. They spent all that time and energy invested at MODEX of having all their equipment there and being able to showcase it. Well, this video highlights that and they took the video, embedded it on one of their product pages, and now they’re actually running pay-per-click campaigns. So whether it’s Google PPC or Display but they’re now driving traffic to that page and people are watching the videos. So by no means is one video going to seal the deal and make them buy right away, but it’s definitely a way to engage with that audience that’s coming there on that page. And really, when you think of the stats that I mentioned at the very beginning, that’s the data that supports it. So they’re spending a lot more time on this page because they have that video to be able to watch. So a great way to help increase that conversion rate and overall experience with the pay-per-click campaign. So, love what they’re doing with that.

So here we go: video in the sales process. How do we incorporate that into a follow-up campaign? Realizing that there’s so, everyone’s sales process is different, okay? Some of them are two-year processes. Others are single-year, maybe six months. Everything’s different. We really look at eight to 12 touches before a lead or prospect is really engaged with wanting to purchase your product. So, we think through, here’s some different steps, okay. Obviously you have your email follow-ups from your phone calls, things like that. What is a valuable resource that you can share with them? Jot down three different resources that are applicable to the vast majority of your prospects. So have that content ready to go. This is mapped out with a little bit of if and statements. If they do this, then do that. But incorporate that video. Get that video into an email as another touchpoint to bring value.

So, when we look at that data point where it says that the buyers are watching 30 minutes of video influencing their purchase decisions, this is another asset. And you’re thinking, “Okay, great. I have this one video here that I’m able to leverage. It’s definitely better than nothing. I think it’s way better than nothing.” And so you have that. Well, now we’ve got a lot of sales teams that are typically traveling. They’re on the road; they’re going to different shows. Well, now they’re not. A lot of people are grounded, so to speak, so sit them down. Have them use the webcam on their computer. It doesn’t need to be super fancy. And have them record those frequently asked question videos. They don’t have to have it be perfect on the first take, but they need to do that. They need to have that content memorialized into a video.

And this is where we had mentioned in another webinar a couple of weeks ago about this concept, and ABB, when they were a guest on IndustrialSage last year, okay, was talking about these digital cul-de-sacs. So, this digital cul-de-sac is where you have essentially a hub video, so it could be this the short about us video and then below it, you’re able to list off all the different video topics and additional video assets that they’re able to view. And this is where it’s powerful. When you have videos in a variety of topics, and you’re leveraging different Serum Systems, I know Salesforce can do this, Pardot, Hubspot, they are tracking what your prospects are doing on your website. So if you’re able to see that they’re clicking on a particular video topic, that is giving you valuable insights on what you need to address. What is that problem they’re trying to solve? And then when you’re able to go through and see how much of that video content they watched, it lets you know: are they just browsing? Kind of just window shopping, so to speak? Or are they really in that consideration mode? Are they reviewing this video content in detail? Are they sharing it with other people within their organization? When you’re able to capture that data, it makes the information or it makes that process for your sales team much more efficient. They’re able to bring that much more value and insights to the table at each one of those conversations that they’re having with their prospects. So it’s not just the subject matter expertise that your sales team has in being able to kind of dig through and find those challenges that your prospects are facing, but being able to memorialize it and have it work for you 24 seven, 365.

So, and why is this important, okay? All this COVID-19, coronavirus, all this stuff’s happening. It’s really throwing a lot of organizations for a loop. What are we going to do with this sales process? We don’t have trade shows. What are we going to do? For those that were leveraging digital before, all right, wonderful. You’re somewhat a step ahead of everybody else. But given that people are working from home, real-world example, okay? Talking with a variety of industrial organizations and both the husband and wife work and they have kids and what are they doing? Well, their daycare is closed for a lot of them, so one of the parents needs to watch the kids, so mom is getting up at four a.m. and working till eight a.m., so that she can get her hours in and then husband is working from eight to five and then mom is taking over working from five to whenever she’s able to finish her day. So what does that mean? Well, what it means is that typically, your sales team is available nine to five, eight to six, or maybe 24 seven, depending on how dedicated they are, but they’re available, okay? I don’t know how many of you are answering your prospects’ phone calls at 9:00, let alone a prospect actually calling you at 9:00 at night, when they’re finally able to do that research. The fires from the day are done and settled. They’re able to do that research. If you don’t have the content available on your website that is able to answer and address their challenges and explain in a non-over-the-top salesy, this-is-why-we’re-so-wonderful way, you’re missing out. They’re going to be going to someone else’s website. They’re not going to be on your website. So you need this data. You need this video content to be able to, whether it’s video or it’s blogs or product pages, obviously video is extremely engaging and powerful. You can see how much they’re watching. So, I really encourage you to create this content right now.

Think strategic during this time period. That way, when the dust settles, you’re hitting the ground running, and you’re building your pipeline right now instead of trying, fumbling and trying to figure things out. Here we go; I love this. I always love looking at these different documents and seeing this written down on the screen. It’s like, “This is the goofiest thing,” but I don’t know. I wanted to include it. Bonus resources, okay, I feel like I’ve been talking for forever; it’s only been 30 minutes. Wow, a lot of great stuff here, so this is where, and I’m going to explain a couple of things about IndustrialSage, and then we’ll go into some questions if you guys have any questions. So, we’ve made IndustrialSage an open platform. Seems kind of crazy that we allow other people, other organizations, other companies, to publish on our website. Well, this is how we’re doing it. So, we have IndustrialSage News, okay? Julianna, she’s fantastic. We need you to submit your press releases. You have some valuable program coming out, new product, new announcement, we want to hear about it, and we want to incorporate it into our news. There is no cost right now to submit a press release, and essentially pitch Julianna on incorporating it into a video segment or a news article on our website, and each one of these news articles we publish to our audience, our social audience and our email audience and within a given week, we’re reaching 20,000 plus industrial professionals. Wide variety, but we’re reaching them. So, a great way to get your information out there in front of your peers and your prospects.

Next is, become a contributor on IndustrialSage. So, we’ve talked about creating content, having it live on your website. Well, now we’re talking about leveraging content and incorporating it onto a third party website, where you’re able to position yourself, again, as a thought leader. So, you fill out a form, we approve you to be a contributor on the site, and then you’re able to publish. Yes, there’s some editorial rules. We don’t want it to be a infomercial, so to speak, because who wants to sit through that, but if you’re able to provide valuable content within your industry, okay, within that category, so if you’re conveyor belts, we want to know why, what information and value those that are purchasing conveyor belts, they need to have. Think through that. Educate, somewhat entertain, but it’s a great way to increase your reach, increase that distribution of your thought leadership and your brand. Totally free, so obviously IndustrialSage needs to make money some way, so there are some paid opportunities. You just have to raise your hand, and I can share with you those one-on-one.

Next, we’ve seen a massive number of valuable webinars. All over LinkedIn, people are sharing them left and right and once they’re published, once they happen, they disappear. We were thinking, “This is crazy. This is amazing content that you guys are producing. A lot of time and energy to build this, and the time to record it,” so I sure hope you’re recording them, but we’re creating a webinar directory. There is no cost to have your webinar published and hosted on the IndustrialSage platform. As we get more and more topics, we’ll segment it better and all that, but there’s no cost to have that, to submit it and get it on there and also, if you have an upcoming webinar, we want to know about that too. That way, we can help distribute it and get it in front of more of your peers and more of your prospects. So, those are three of those bonus resources that are available to any and all organizations that want to participate on the IndustrialSage platform.

So let’s see, obviously there’s a lot of content that we’re creating on IndustrialSage. And our goal is really to help create this ecosystem where industrial professionals are able to share information, engage, be informed, educated, and get with the times , if we want to say that. We’re seeing, who was it that made an announcement, that they’re no longer printing their print version of their directory or magazine, okay? This is throwing a lot of people for a loop. They don’t know what to do. They like to see their print ad. Well, here’s the thing. If organizations were truly seeing the value out of it, do you think that that trade magazine would stop selling it? Do you think they would stop? So it makes you really wonder. It makes you question, “Well, what are they doing?” They’re trying to do digital. And we’ll see what happens. We obviously want everyone to grow and benefit. Rising tide lifts all boats, and that’s really a mantra that we have here that we want to support and be beneficial. We think we’re doing something very different. We’re doing things different, and that gets us very excited.

So, without further ado, let’s see, I’m going to try and answer some of your questions, so if you have any questions, go ahead and send them in. Let’s see, I think we can, and we’ll come in here, give it a moment. I’m going to drink some water. I’ve been talking non-stop. Love it. So, sure you can see we kind of have some alter-egos so we have our traditional IndustrialSage logo from the beginning; now we have, and you can see there, bottom of the screen, the new IndustrialSage logo, and really wanting to bring everyone together as a great community and resource. Let’s see, come on, anybody have any questions? Andrew? Let’s see, Mark, do you have anything? Let’s see, Cindy, I’m just going to call everybody out on it, let’s see. Coming through. All right. All right, well, we’ll give it another minute. I don’t know if, let’s see, maybe there’s some questions on the live stream. Let me pull that up real quick. I just don’t want to cut things off while I have you all to do this, so, let’s see. Not this. All right, cool. Don’t see anything on there. All right, well, hey, guys, I really appreciate you coming on today. I hope it was valuable, a valuable resource. I’m going to send out a follow-up with some different links to a variety of things that I’ve talked about, some additional resources.

Okay, Mark, all right, I will, I’ll connect with you afterwards and then, yeah, we’ll stay in touch, so listen, IndustrialSage, we’re here for you. We want to help you. There’s a lot of new and unknowns out here in the industry right now, and we want to be a valuable resource. So we’ve been speaking with over 150 organizations and each time we are asking them, “What are you seeing? What is going on? What are these challenges you guys are facing?” And really, a big question that we get is trade shows. Are we going to do them? Should we do them? If it happens, I think there’s still a variety of trade shows that are on the schedule, and I hate to say it, but the feedback we’re getting is a big question mark. Some of them have decided, “No, we’re done. We’re going to take the next 365 days, and not do a single trade show.” So they’re reallocating budget, reallocating resources, and doing that. And the reason that they’re giving is that even if the event is happening, they don’t think the attendance will be there, so they would rather not invest it into that point. So, I know it’s, in a lot of ways, it’s throwing people for that loop. A lot of traditional sales teams that are ingrained in their ways are doing that. But that’s the nature of the beast. That’s where we’re at right now.

Okay, so, “can you send out the links to upload press releases?” Yes, absolutely, so what I will do is a little bit after the webinar today, I will get you a link to everything that I’ve talked about. So where to submit for the press releases, where to request to be a contributor, and even where to submit your webinar, whether it’s happened already, you can give us a Dropbox link to the video file or wherever it’s located or future webinars. So definitely, we’ll get that out to you, so wonderful, I love seeing this feedback; really appreciate that, Lily. That means a lot. A lot of great stuff.

As always, super available. It’s been my objective to just add value, add value, add value. I mean, for pete’s sake, we gave 150 videos away to the industry, so we’re not messing around. We really want to help the industry live digital, thrive in this digital environment, and… yeah. Super excited. So, I will let you know if we have any other webinars. Any questions you think of later on, send me an email, you’ve got it. And I hope you all have a wonderful day. We’re getting some beautiful weather down here in Atlanta finally, so this is great, so all right, wonderful. Thank you so much.

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